How SDP can make dent on PAP lead

Even if Mad Dog remains leader. They have to be a lot more savvy in their use of social media. It can be done even if the SDP doesn’t have much money (Err where’s the CIA money Dr Chee?). From the BBC on how Labour used social media in the last UK election. Even though Labour lost, it did a lot better than expected.

The digital alt-left cannot be ignored

Sites such as The Canary, The Skwawkbox, and Another Angry Voice are making a huge impact and earning a massive following. We have tended to focus on the alt-right or anti-establishment right online, looking at websites like Breitbart, Westmonster and – in America – InfoWars.

As Jim Waterson of Buzzfeed UK argued in this excellent report, sites on the alt-left now boast hundreds of thousands of addicted and often politically active readers. They break news stories, thrive on social media shares, and run emotionally charged, highly partisan material that is handy in a tight race when you need to get the vote out.

That some of them – not necessarily the three I mention above – are adept at sharing fake news is no impediment to their influence.

And

Money isn’t everything on Facebook

There is nothing new, of course, about the deployment of Facebook to spread a message, encourage donations, and bypass journalists. In 2008, Barack Obama harnessed Facebook superbly to raise vast sums of money and beat John McCain.

I spoke to Sam Jeffers, co-founder of the Who Targets Me? Project. He repeated something he said to The Times over the weekend: That according to his sample (11,000 volunteers), the Tories’ Facebook campaigning was focused on fewer seats.
Image caption Sam Jeffers co-founded the Who Targets Me? Project

In the last 48 hours of the campaign, his volunteers saw Labour adverts in 464 constituencies, and Tory adverts in only 205.

This is just one project, of course, but given the Tories had a bigger war chest, it is astonishing.

“What we’ve also seen is far more sharing of Labour’s ads, so that even in the seats the Tories were really targeting in the north, the ads they were paying for were being drowned out in people’s news feeds by a sea of red ads and articles that were shared ‘organically’ by friends and family. Those messages are going to have a lot more weight in people’s minds.”

So you can spend loads on Facebook, as the Tories did (we don’t yet know how much); but Labour may have had a bigger impact (possibly by spending less) because their adverts resonated emotionally.

Social media is a joke at influencing politics, remember 2015 and the huge waves that the opposition was making on social media, and then the PAP wave. The alt-left is loosing and is going to continue to lose because they simply don’t have the numbers and democracy is ultimately a game of numbers. The opposition has the same problem, they don’t have the numbers in the hyper FPTP game that is Singapore democracy